one
Sucker punch.
It was one of my little brother Jeremy’s pet expressions when we were kids. He used it when regaling the scuffles that would break out at the bus stop or in the halls of our junior high, his voice high and excited, his lips shiny with spittle:
WHAM! POW. Total sucker punch, man!
He’d then eagerly sock one fist into his other cupped palm, exceedingly pleased with himself. But that was years ago. Jeremy was a dentist now, in practice with my father, and I’m sure he hadn’t witnessed, received, or rehashed a sucker punch in over a decade.
I hadn’t thought of those words in just as long—until that memorable cab ride. I had just left Rachel’s place and was telling my driver about my horrifying discovery.
“Wow,” he said in a heavy Queens accent. “Your girlfriend really
sucker punched
you good, huh?”
“Yes,” I cried, all but licking my wounds. “She certainly did.” Loyal, reliable Rachel, my best friend of twenty-five years, who always had my interests ahead of, or at least tied with, her own, had—
WHAM! POW!
—sucker punched me. Blindsided me. The surprise element of her betrayal was what burned me the most. The fact that I never saw it coming. It was as unexpected as a seeing-eye dog willfully leading his blind, trusting owner into the path of a Mack truck.
Truth be told, things weren’t quite as simple as I made them out to be to my cab driver. But I didn’t want him to lose sight of the main issue—the issue of what Rachel had done to me. I had made some mistakes, but I hadn’t betrayed our friendship.
It was the week before what would have been my wedding day, and I had gone over to Rachel’s to tell her that my wedding was called off. My fiance, Dex, had been the first to say the difficult words—that perhaps we shouldn’t get married—but I had quickly agreed because I’d been having an affair with Marcus, one of Dexter’s friends. One thing had led to another, and after one particular steamy night, I had become pregnant. It was all hugely difficult to absorb, and I knew the hardest part would be confessing everything to Rachel, who, at the start of the summer, had been mildly interested in Marcus. The two had gone on a few dates, but the romance had petered out when, unbeknownst to her, my relationship with Marcus began. I felt terrible the entire time—for cheating on Dex, but even
more
for lying to Rachel. Still, I was ready to come clean to my best friend. I was sure that she would understand. She always did.
So I stoically arrived at Rachel’s apartment on the Upper East Side.
“What’s the matter?” she asked as she answered the door.
I felt a wave of comfort as I thought to myself how soothing and familiar those words were. Rachel was a maternal best friend, more maternal than my own mother. I thought of all the times my friend had asked me this question over the years: such as the time I left my father’s sunroof down during a thunderstorm, or the day I got my period all over my white Guess jeans. She was always there with her “What’s the matter?” followed by her “It’s going to be all right,” delivered in a competent tone that made me feel sure that she was right. Rachel could fix anything. Make me feel better when nobody else could. Even at that moment, when she might have felt disappointed that Marcus had chosen me over her, I was sure she’d rise to the occasion and reassure me that I had chosen the right path, that things happened for a reason, that I wasn’t a villain, that I was right to follow my heart, that she completely understood, and that eventually Dex would too.
I took a deep breath and glided into her orderly studio apartment as she rattled on about the wedding, how she was at my service, ready to help with any last-minute details.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding,” I blurted out.
“What?” she asked. Her lips blended right in with the rest of her pale face. I watched her turn and sit on her bed. Then she asked me who called it off.
I had a flashback to high school. After a breakup, which was always a very public happening in high school, guys and girls alike would ask, “Who did it?” Everyone wanted to know who was the dumper and who the dumpee so that they could properly assign blame and dole out pity.
I said what I could never say in high school because, to be frank, I was never the dumpee. “It was mutual… Well, technically Dexter was the one. He told me this morning that he couldn’t go through with it. He doesn’t think that he loves me.” I rolled my eyes. At that point, I didn’t believe that such a thing was possible. I thought the only reason Dex wanted out was because he could sense my growing indifference. The drifting that comes when you fall for someone else.
“You’re kidding me. This is crazy. How do you feel?”
I studied my pink-striped jeweled Prada sandals and matching pink toenail polish and took a deep breath. Then I confessed that I had been having an affair with Marcus, dismissing a pang of guilt. Sure, Rachel had had a small summer crush on Marcus, but she had never slept with him, and it had been weeks since she had even kissed him. She just couldn’t be
that
upset by the news.
“So you slept with him?” Rachel asked in a loud, strange voice. Her cheeks flushed pink—a sure sign that she was angry—but I plowed on, divulging full details, telling her how our affair had begun, how we tried to stop but couldn’t overcome the crazy pull toward each other. Then I took a deep breath and told her that I was pregnant with Marcus’s baby and that we planned on getting married. I braced myself for a few tears, but Rachel remained composed. She asked a few questions, which I answered honestly. Then I thanked her for not hating me, feeling incredibly relieved that despite the upheaval in my life, I still had my anchor, my best friend.
“Yeah… I don’t hate you,” Rachel said, sweeping a strand of hair behind her ear.
“I hope Dex takes it as well. At least as far as Marcus goes. He’s going to hate him for a while. But Dex is rational. Nobody did this on purpose to hurt him. It just happened.”
And then, just as I was about to ask her if she would still be my maid of honor when I married Marcus, my whole world collapsed around me. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again, nor had things ever been as I thought they were. That was the moment I saw Dexter’s watch on my best friend’s nightstand. An unmistakable vintage Rolex.
“Why is Dexter’s watch on your nightstand?” I asked, silently praying that she would offer a logical and benign explanation.
But instead, she shrugged and stammered that she didn’t know. Then she said that it was actually
her
watch, that she had one just like his. Which was not plausible because I had searched for months to find that watch and then bought a new crocodile band for it, making it a true original. Besides, even had it been a predictable, spanking-new Rolex Oyster Perpetual, her voice was shaking, her face even paler than usual. Rachel can do many things well, but lying isn’t one of them. So I knew. I knew that my best friend in the world had committed an unspeakable act of betrayal.
The rest unfolded in slow motion. I could practically hear the sound effects that accompanied
The Bionic Woman,
one of my favorite shows. One of
our
favorite shows—I had watched every episode with Rachel. I stood up, grabbed the watch from her nightstand, flipped it over, and read the inscription aloud. “All my love, Darcy.” My words felt thick and heavy in my throat as I remembered the day I had his watch engraved. I had called Rachel on my cell and asked her about the wording. “All my love” had been her suggestion.
I stared at her, waiting, but she still said nothing. Just stared at me with those big, brown eyes, her always ungroomed brows furrowed above them.
“What the fuck?” I said evenly. Then I screamed the question again as I realized that Dex was likely lurking in the apartment, hiding somewhere. I shoved past her into the bathroom, whipping open the shower curtain. Nothing. I darted forward to check the closet.
“Darcy, don’t,” she said, blocking the door with her back.
“Move!” I screamed. “I know he’s in there!”
So she moved and I opened the door. And sure enough, there he was, crouched in the corner in his striped navy boxers. Another gift from me.
“You liar!” I shouted at him, feeling myself begin to hyperventilate. I was accustomed to drama. I
thrived
on drama. But not this kind. Not the kind of drama that I didn’t control from the outset.
Dex stood and dressed calmly, putting one foot and then the other into his jeans, zipping defiantly. There wasn’t a trace of guilt on his face. It was as if I had only accused him of stealing the covers or eating my Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.
“You lied to me!” I shouted again, louder this time.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, his voice low. “Fuck you, Darcy.”
In all my years with Dex, he had never said this to me. Those were my words of last resort. Not his.
I tried again. “You said there was nobody else in the picture! And you’re
fucking
my best friend!” I shouted, unsure of whom to confront first. Overwhelmed by the double betrayal.
I wanted him to say, yes, this looks bad, but there had been no fornicating. Yet no denial came my way. Instead he said, “Isn’t that a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, Darce? You and Marcus, huh? Having a baby? I guess congratulations are in order.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I just turned the tables right back on him and said, “I knew it all along.”
This was a total lie. I never in a million years could have foreseen this moment. The shock was too much to bear. But that’s the thing about the sucker punch; the sucker element hurts worse than the punch. They had socked it to me, but I wasn’t going to be their fool too.
“I hate you both. I always will,” I said, realizing that my words sounded weak and juvenile, like the time when I was five years old and told my father that I loved the devil more than I loved him. I wanted to shock and horrify, but he had only chuckled at my creative put-down. Dex, too, seemed merely amused by my proclamation, which enraged me to the brink of tears. I told myself that I had to escape Rachel’s apartment before I started bawling. On my way to the door, I heard Dex say, “Oh, Darcy?”
I turned to face him again.
“What?”
I spat out, praying that he was going to say it was all a joke, a big mix-up. Maybe they were going to laugh and ask how I could think such a thing. Maybe we’d even share a group hug.
But all he said was, “May I have my watch back, please?”
I swallowed hard and then hurled the watch at him, aiming for his face. Instead it hit a wall, skittered across her hardwood floor, and stopped just short of Dexter’s bare feet. My eyes lifted from the watch to Rachel’s face. “And you,” I said to her. “I never want to see you again. You are dead to me.”
two
I managed to make it downstairs (where I gave Rachel’s doorman the gruesome highlights), into a cab (where I again shared the tale), and over to Marcus’s place. I burst into his sloppy studio, where he sat cross-legged on the floor, playing a melody on his guitar that sounded vaguely like the refrain in “Fire and Rain.”
He looked up at me, his expression a blend of annoyance and bemusement. “What’s wrong
now
?” he said.
I resented his use of the word
now,
implying that I am always having a crisis. I couldn’t help what had just happened to me. I told him the whole story, sparing no detail. I wanted outrage from my new beau. Or at least shock. But no matter how much I tried to whip him into my same frenzied state, he’d fire back with these two points:
How can you be mad when we did the same thing to them
? And
, Don’t we want our friends to be as happy as we are
?
I told him that our guilt was beside the point and,
HELL NO, WE
DON’T WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY
!
Marcus kept strumming his guitar and smirking.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, exasperated. “Nothing is funny about this situation!”
“Well maybe not
ha-ha
funny, but ironic funny.”
“There is nothing even
remotely
funny about this, Marcus! And stop playing that thing!”
Marcus ran his thumb across the strings one final time before putting his guitar in its case. Then he sat cross-legged, gripping the toes of his dirty sneakers, as he said again, “I just don’t see how you can be so outraged when we did the same thing—”
“It’s not the same thing at all!” I said, dropping to the cool floor. “See, I may have cheated on
Dex
with you. But I didn’t do anything to Rachel.”
“Well,” he said. “She and I did date for a minute. We had potential before you came along.”
“You went on a few lousy dates whereas I was
engaged
to Dex. What kind of person hooks up with her friend’s fiance?”
He crossed his arms and gave me a knowing look. “Darcy.”
“What?”
“You’re looking at one. Remember? I was one of Dexter’s groomsmen? Ring a bell?”
I sniffed. True, Marcus and Dex had been college buddies, friends for years. But it just wasn’t a comparable situation. “It’s not the same. Female friendships are more sacred; my relationship with Rachel has been lifelong. She was my very best friend in the world, and you were, like, the very last one stuck in the groomsman lineup. Dex probably wouldn’t even have picked you except that he needed a fifth person to go with my five girls.”
“Gee. I’m touched.”
I ignored his sarcasm, and said, “Besides, you never painted yourself as a saint like she did.”
“You’re right about that. I’m no saint.”
“You just don’t go there with your best girlfriend’s fiance. Or ex-fiance. Period. Ever. Even if a gazillion years elapsed, you still can’t go there. And you certainly don’t hop in bed with him one day after the breakup.” Then I hurled more questions his way:
Did he think it was a one-time thing? Were they beginning a relationship? Could they actually fall in love? Would they ever last?
To which Marcus shrugged and answered with some variation of:
I don’t know and I don’t care
.
To which I yelled:
Guess! Care! Soothe me
!
Finally, he caved, patting my arm and responding satisfyingly to my leading questions. He agreed that it was likely a one-time thing with Rachel and Dex. That Dex went over to Rachel’s because he was upset. That being with Rachel was the closest thing to me. And as for Rachel, she just wanted to throw a bone to a broken man.
“Okay. So what do you think I should do now?” I asked.
“Nothing you can do,” Marcus said, reaching over to open a pizza box resting near his guitar case. “It’s cold, but help yourself.”
“As if I could eat now!” I exhaled dramatically and did a spread eagle on the floor. “The way I see it is, I have two options: murder and/or suicide… It would be pretty easy to kill them, you know?”
I wanted him to gasp at my suggestion, but much to my constant disappointment, he was never too shocked by my words. He simply pulled a slice of pizza from the box, folded it in half, and crammed it in his mouth. He chewed for a moment, and with his mouth still full, he pointed out that I would be the prime and only suspect. “You’d wind up at a female corrections facility in upstate New York. With a mullet. I can see you now slopping out gruel with your mullet flapping in the prison yard breeze.”
I thought about this and decided that I’d vastly prefer my own death to a mullet. Which brought me to the suicide option. “Fine. So murder is out. I’ll just kill myself instead. They’d be really sorry if I killed myself, wouldn’t they?” I asked, more for shock value than because I was really considering my own death.
I wanted Marcus to tell me that he couldn’t live without me. But he didn’t take the bait in the suicide game as Rachel had when we were in junior high, and she’d promise that she’d override my mother’s classical music selections and see to it that Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away” was cranked up at my funeral.
“They’d be so sorry if I killed myself,” I said to Marcus. “Think they’d come to my funeral? Would they apologize to my parents?”
“Yeah. Probably so. But people move on fast. In fact, sometimes they even forget about you
at
the funeral, depending on how good the food is.”
“But what about their guilt?” I asked. “How could they live with themselves?”
He assured me that the initial guilt could be assuaged by any good therapist. So after a few weeknights on a leather couch, the person, once racked with
what ifs,
would come to understand that only a very troubled soul would take her own life, and that one, albeit significant, act of betrayal doesn’t cause a healthy person to jump in front of the number 6 train.
I knew that Marcus was right, remembering that when Rachel and I were sophomores in high school, one of our classmates, Ben Murray, shot himself in the head with his father’s revolver in his bedroom while his parents watched television downstairs. The stories varied—but, bottom line, we all knew that it had something to do with a fight he’d had with his girlfriend, Amber Lucetti, who had dumped him for a college guy she met while visiting her sister at Illinois State. None of us could forget the moment when a guidance counselor ushered Amber out of speech class to give her the horrific news. Nor could we forget the sound of Amber’s wails echoing in the halls. We all imagined that she’d lose it altogether and end up in a mental ward somewhere.
Yet within a few days, Amber was back in class, giving a speech on the recent stock market crash. I had just given my speech on why grocery-store makeup was the way to go—over more expensive makeup—as it all comes from the same big vats of oils and powder. I marveled at Amber’s ability to give such a substantive speech, barely glancing at her index cards, when her ex-boyfriend was in a coffin under the frozen ground. And her competent speech was nothing compared to the spectacle she created when making out with Alan Hysack at the Spring Dance, fewer than three months after Ben’s funeral.
So if I were striving to destroy Rachel and Dex’s world, suicide might not be the answer, either. Which left me with one option: stay on course with my charmed, perfect life. Don’t they say that happiness is the best revenge? I’d marry Marcus, have his baby, and ride off into the sunset, never looking back.
“Hey. Give me a slice after all,” I said to Marcus. “I’m eating for two now.”
That night I called my parents and broke the news. My father answered and I told him to put Mom on the other extension. “Mom, Dad, the wedding is off. I’m so sorry,” I said stoically, perhaps too stoically because they instantly assumed that I was solely to blame for the breakup. Dear ol’ Dex would never cancel a wedding the week before it was to take place. My mother turned on her sob switch, wailing about how much she loved Dexter, while my father shouted over her in his “Now, Darcy. Don’t be rash” tone. At which point, I dropped the closet-story bomb on them. A rare hush fell over the phone. They were so silent that I thought for a second that we had been disconnected. My father finally said there must be some mistake because Rachel would never do such a thing. I told them I never would have believed it either. But I saw it with my own two eyes—Dex in his boxers in Rachel’s closet. Needless to say, I said nothing about Marcus or the baby to my parents. I wanted to have their full emotional and financial support. I wanted them to cast the blame on Rachel, the neighborhood girl who had duped them just as she had duped me. Perfect, trustworthy, good-hearted, loyal, reliable, predictable Rachel.
“What are we going to do, Hugh?” my mother asked my father in her little-girl tone.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Everything will be fine. Darcy, don’t you worry about a thing. We have the guest list. We’ll call the family. We’ll contact The Carlyle, the photographer. Everyone. You sit tight. Do you want us to come out on our same flight on Thursday or do you want a ticket to come home? You say the word, honey.”
My father was in full-on crisis mode, the way he got during a tornado watch or a snowstorm or anytime our declawed, half-blind indoor cat would escape out the back door and dart out into the street, while my mother and I freaked out, secretly delighting in the drama.
“I don’t know, Daddy. I just can’t even think straight right now.”
My dad sighed and then said, “Do you want me to call Dex? Talk some sense into him?”
“No, Daddy. It won’t do any good. It’s over. Please don’t. I have some pride.”
“That
bastard”
my mother chimed in. “And Rachel! I just can’t believe that little tramp.”
“Dee, that’s not helping,” my father said.
“Well, I know,” my mother said. “But I just can’t believe that Rachel would do such a thing. And how in the world could Dex
want
to be with
her
?”
“I know!” I said. “There’s no way that they’re
actually
together, right? He couldn’t
really
like her?”
“No. No way,” my mother said.
“I’m sure Rachel is sorry,” my dad said. “It was a very inappropriate thing to do.”
”
Inappropriate
isn’t the word for it,” my mother said.
My father tried again. “Treacherous? Opportunistic?”
My mother agreed with this assessment. “She probably wanted him the whole time you were with him.”
“I know,” I said, feeling a fleeting sense of regret that I had let Dex go. Everyone viewed him as such a prize. I looked at Marcus to reassure myself I had done the right thing, but he was eyeing his PlayStation.
“Has Rachel called to explain or apologize?” my dad continued.
“Not yet,” I said.
“She will,” my mom said. “And in the meantime, you stay strong, honey. Everything will be fine. You’re a beautiful girl. You will find someone else. Someone better. Tell her, Hugh.”
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said. “Everything’s going to be just fine. I promise you.”